Keker and Little are partners at the San Francisco, Calif., law firm of Keker & Van Nest LLP. They have worked together on numerous high-profile white collar criminal cases, including former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow who was charged with over 100 counts of securities fraud and other crimes. The pair has also represented Mississippi plaintiffs’ attorney Dickie Scruggs and investment banker Frank Quattrone. In 1995, they obtained an acquittal at trial for San Francisco attorney Patrick Hallinan, charged with RICO and drug conspiracy offenses.

Presenting the award, NACDL Executive Director Norman Reimer said, “This year’s recipients of NACDL’s White Collar Criminal Defense Award, John Keker and Jan Nielsen Little, partners at Keker & Van Nest LLP, are truly a dynamic duo. They are two lawyers of extraordinary talent and tenacious resolve who not only excel in advocacy for their clients, but excel also in setting the highest standards of professionalism and service to their colleagues in the defense bar and society at large.”

Keker co-founded Keker & Van Nest LLP in 1978. He represented cyclist Lance Armstrong in a case in which the Department of Justice terminated its investigation of Armstrong without filing any criminal charges. Keker is a graduate of Yale Law School and received his B.A. from Princeton University. He clerked with U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren and served as a Marine infantry platoon leader during the Vietnam War.

Jan Nielsen Little

Little has been a practicing criminal defense lawyer for more than 25 years. She represented a Silicon Valley executive in the country’s first stock options backdating prosecution, obtaining a dismissal of six of eight counts and a 60-day sentence on the remaining counts. Little earned her J.D. at Yale Law School and her B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, completed a clerkship with Judge William W. Schwarzer of the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, and worked with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division before becoming a defense attorney.

The NACDL White Collar Criminal Defense College at Stetson is an educational “boot-camp” program for legal practitioners from across the country wishing to gain key advocacy skills and learn substantive white collar law from masters in the field.